US graduate moves to Prague to escape student loan repayment, $60 per month was psychological burden
Amanda Lynn Tully told NYT she fled US to escape her student loan repayment and will never return to the US.
An Oregon University student with a specialization in Art History, Criticism and Conservation, Amanda Lynn Tully, left the US and moved to Prague to escape her student loan repayment because it was a psychological burden. The case came to the fore because of a New York Times report which elaborated how a record number of student loan borrowers became defaulters and then left the country to abandon their loans. Tully graduated in 2017 with a master’s degree with $65,000 in federal student loans and she had no job at hand. She did not wait more than a year to find a job and she decided to move to Prague, completed an internship, and became a loan defaulter. She did not make any payment in over seven years. And she did not hide her plan to never return to the US. The NYT report said Tully was on an income-based repayment plan, which allows borrowers to have their remaining debt forgiven after 20 years of making qualifying payments. For her, the qualifying payment was $60 per month. But she said it was psychologically burdensome. “The payments weren’t even paying off the interest, so it was frustrating,” Tully said.Though the NYT story reported similar cases, where those individuals chose to be loan defaulters, Amanda drew flak. Social media users noted that she could not afford $60 a month but she was wearing designer headphones for her photoshoot for the NYT. “You borrowed the money. You spent it on a useless degree. Pay it back ot stop complaining,” one wrote. Amanda’s LinkedIn profile shows she is open to work and is now an e-learning content developer, something that she had been doing since 2019 after being a self-employed English language teacher in the Czech Republic for the first two years after she fled the US only to escape loan repayment.
